Partition and boot questions

Hey guys!~ It's sure been a while, hasn't it?

Anyway, I'm building a new computer when the parts get here, and I was wondering: I am going to put custom Vlited Vista 64 ultimate on it when I get it. Can I put the operating system on a partition and everything else on another partition? And, if I do this, can I just delete the operating system partition, and put, say, windows 7 or xp on it and will all of the files be able to be used by the new operating system?

And what partitioner should I use? I want a good, simple visual partitioner that you can boot to?

Anyone? Nobody knows of any visual, free partitioner that I can use?

Edit: never mind. Gparted.

if you make the partition in vista xp should see it not the other way around though..

by rights any will do, and to answer your question, yes, i used to have a second drive just for all my files, but this has now been moved off machine to a NAS.

When it was in my machine all OS's i used could access it, WIndows 98, XP, Vista, 7, Linux Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse, Mint, Xandros Ect Ect

You get the point, i hope :)

It's all been installed for a while and everything is working right now. I'm using vista ultimate 64, and that's it, I really just wanted to do this to make it slightly easier to upgrade to a new OS when the time comes. I know that a lot of my programs offload stuff onto the window's drive, but it will be an interesting experience upgrading when 7 comes out.